Home Sweet Childhood Home

I live about ten minutes from my childhood home. As a child, I lived with my mother, father and younger brother. I grew up in a brick ranch house. Let me take you on a tour down memory lane.

Purple phlox covered the sloping banks near the steps that led from our driveway to our sidewalk. The concrete sidewalk was long enough for marking hopscotch squares in chalk or practicing standing broad jumps. The walkway took a sharp turn to the left, meeting the front porch steps of our house. No one else had ever lived there. Only us!

Just inside the front door was our living room. Hardwood floors, swept free of dust, were cool under my bare feet. A gold framed mirror hung on the white wall above my couch. If I jumped high enough, I saw my reflection in the glass as I practiced cheer jumps. Facing the couch was our TV, complete with rabbit ears. A yellow rotary phone sat on a shelf of a divider, built by my father, which was placed in the space between the living room and kitchen.

Three bedrooms and a bathroom were down the hallway. My brother and I would run and slide down the long hall in our socks over and over again for fun. In our rooms, we sat on the floor, playing games retrieved from basement storage. We read books. We listened to songs on our transistor radios or on our shared record turntable. The walls contained our laughter!

Called into the kitchen for meals by our mother, we raced to the wooden table and took our usual seats. As we ate, lingering daylight beckoned to us through the large kitchen window, urging us to rush outside to play in the backyard.

The yard was large and flat. There were flowering bushes all along the sides. The hydrangeas were a vibrant blue. The peonies, a bold pink. Honeysuckle grew along the fence line, filling the air with a sweet smell. A redbud tree stood beside our swing set. The yard was perfect for riding our bikes, running races and playing games like kickball, badminton and tag! We rested in the cool grass and looked for four leaf clovers.

At dusk, we propped our bikes against our chain link fence. We ran up the back porch steps and went back inside our home sweet home.